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When I heard about the announcement that Paragon Studios and City of Heroes were going to be shut down, my MMO game time schedule changed somewhat abruptly.

During the summer I had essentially taken a break from City of Heroes to focus the little MMO time I had on The Secret World and a bit on Guild Wars 2. But with the availability of City of Heroes potentially coming to a stop fairly soon, I changed my focus to switch back to the Rogue Isles and Paragon City again. Not much time has been spent in The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 play time came to a complete stop. Almost all of the MMO time I have goes into City of Heroes now.

Dr Vahzilok is ‘arrested’

While the situation looks bleak, there are still efforts going on to rally people for supporting the game and the effort to save it. The latest of these events was Positron’s Ally – an event where people would join up to play Positron’s Task Force part 1 and 2 and show support for the effort to save the game.

The event was running at two occasions – Thursday the 20th and Saturday the 22nd. I was not around on Thursday, but joined in on Saturday with one of the three task force teams that formed on Defiant, with TonyV from Titan Network in the lead. While there were three separate task force teams, everyone joined in the same league chat – good fun and good spirits! After the task forces were completed, most of the team members joined for a photo session to show the support for the game:

Positron’s Ally rally event on Defiant

Thanks to TonyV and Titan Network for arranging the event!

Due to my planned summer break, I had not renewed my subscription to the game, for the first time in more than 6 years. But with the sudden shut down announcement there was no opportunity to get back my VIP status, sicne NCSoft immediately stopped all billing. And there is no indication that they will re-enable that or allow people to try out anything that has been exclusive to VIP status.

Since I was restricted to premium status a number of restrictions were put in place, although less limited than for people who had just started out with the game. My character slots were limited to 18 slots in total, 15 of them assigned to the Defiant server and 3 global slots available. While this means I will never be able to access all of my characters, at least I will be able to access enough of those that I really like.

For the Paragon Rewards I had unlocked all tiers, which meant that I have access to most of the features in the game. But a few things I cannot get access to:

Any incarnate related content and any incarnate powers. So there are maybe 6-8 characters that are a bit less awesome than they used to be and a bunch of content that I cannot play. Not the end of the world – while I did enjoy a number of the incarnate trials and the Dark Astoria story arcs, it is something I have played through multiple times. I will miss some of the awesomeness though.

Cannot access Night Ward story arcs – this annoys me a bit, since I never played them – did not have any characters in a suitable level range when they were released.

Less storage space – a bit inconvenient, but manageable.

Have to re-acquire some powersets. Any powerset that were released as “free for VIPs” now has to be bought. So far this has been the case for one of the characters that I have unlocked.

Signature Story arcs. Technically it is possible to access them through using Paragon Reward points as non-VIP, but they are priced at a quite high price, not really worth it.

Not able to pay SuperGroup base rent. This one annoys me. I have a supergroup and a base that most of my villain characters are members of. The super group have enough prestige saved up to pay the rent for the base for more than 100 years. But I am not allowed to pay the rent as non-VIP and thus access to the base is shut down, because the rent is not paid…

Not allowed to play on beta test server. Some people have started to play on the beta test server instead, where pretty much everything in the store is free currently. Not a big deal for me at the moment, prefer to hang around where most people I know are.

Luckily I had a few thousand Paragon points which I have been using to unlock some of the powersets I wanted to play. This has also included buying access to two new powersets which everyone had to pay for – Water Blast and Nature Affinity.

I started a Water Blast/Kinetics corruptor, Hydronizer, to play with this water oriented powerset. It has been a blast (pun intended) – it is a fun and fast paced powerset. I have never leveled any character to any high levels with Kinetics, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to do that. Currently Hydronizer has reached level 20 and it has been quite enjoyable to play him.

My second new character is another corruptor, a fire blast/nature affinity one named Skogsbrand (forest fire in English). Only at level 9 so far, but has also been quite fun.

In addition to these I have three controllers that I plan to level up more, two of them in the low 40s and one in teen levels. These are Nashira (plant control/trick arrow), Vortexer (gravity control/dark affinity) and Mentis Restio (mind control/time manipulation).

Controller Nashira

I suspect that 2 of them might reach max level before the end and I will probably play a few of my max level characters as well. With a bit more than two months left, if matters do not take a turn for the better, I plan to play the way I have enjoyed the game most of my time here – leveling up a number of alts and a bunch of teaming.